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War comic books in America generally have been marginal to a field dominated by other genres such as adventure, Western, crime, horror, and, preeminently, superhero comics.1 Comics with wartime settings and soldiers as characters did enjoy their own flurry of popularity in the mid1950s,2 but by the 1960s, the genre was in serious artistic and commercial decline.
One explanation for the crisis in war comics is not far to seek: the changing political and technological realities of warfare threatened to render obsolete central thematic conventions of the war comics, two in particular: one major type of war story focused either on a single individual or on a small group in battle, while another concentrated on the spectacular visual depiction of war machines in action.3 But these complementary American obsessions with individualism and with military technology became increasingly problematic as the high-tech set-piece battles of World War II and Korea gave way to guerilla insurgency and nuclear brinksmanship in the middle of the Cold War.
Two contrasting examples from the comic books of 1965-1970 will demonstrate how comics reacted to these pressures of thematic obsolescence. One attempt to adapt the formulas of the war comics to the Cold War resulted in the bizarre military fantasy of Total War: MARS Patrol,4 a 1965 comic-book series which posits an outside invasion which at one stroke would wipe away the Cold War threat of nuclear doomsday and the need for nasty little wars like the one just gathering steam in Vietnam. In contrast to this comic-book longing for a new conventional war, a year after the final issue of Total War and an artistic and philosophical universe away in the underground comix, the story "Raw War Comics," written and drawn by Greg Irons, savagely dismantles the narrative conventions of war comics, which, despite their patina of physical and psychological grit, ultimately glamorize combat.5 In "Raw War Comics" the ideology that is so carefully masked in the Total War series is quite literally exploded in the face of the reader; Total War is a military dream transformed in "Raw War Comics" into a nuclear nightmare.
Even the elephantine memories of comic-book collectors would little note nor long remember the Total War series were not the first three issues drawn by...